


the greatest pretenders (it's always been just you and me)

by heavydiirtysoul



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Edited repost of an old work of mine, Fluff, Josh is a timetraveller, M/M, Slow Burn, Smut, Tyler is just a guy lmao, joshler - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8566693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavydiirtysoul/pseuds/heavydiirtysoul
Summary: Time: noun, the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.
Time: never enough.





	1. Epilogue

Hearing a baby scream wasn't exactly what he had expected when he regained consciousness. His head felt about the size of a football; thumping in the rhythm of his heartbeat and there was an indescribable pressure against the insides of his eyelids; as if his brain was violently trying to squeeze its way out of his eye sockets, no matter the resistance of something minor and unimportant like the walls of his skull. 

He kept his eyes closed for the moment, wondering if maybe someone had seen him faint and called an ambulance, but he doubted his own ridiculous explanation the second the thought crossed his mind. Lane Park was dead at night; even more so than it was throughout the day, and the chance of someone being out and about in a small village like his hometown at 3am in the freaking morning to cross his path at the exact right moment to witness him pass out... Highly questionable, to say the least. 

Nonetheless, he was definitely in a hospital. Not in a bed, that much was clear, seeing that his fingertips slowly coming to life were wandering along the joints of cold, smooth tiles, and that he could hear the quiet beeping undoubtedly coming from a life-support machine along with the oddly familiar pumping sound of a respirator. His eyes remained close as his hands suddenly found his phone, clutching onto it and fiddling it into the pocket of his jeans out of habit. 

The unbearable headache started to fade, and he decided to risk a look at his surroundings. 

 

Bright neon light pierced his eyes, almost causing him to groan; but he could stop the sound from escaping his lips in a subconscious decision that he better kept silent – he wasn't sure if anyone was around and he certainly wasn't in the mood to come up with a hasty explanation as to why in the heavens he would lie on the ground of a hospital restroom in the middle of the night all by himself. Not that he had any real idea what he was doing here either; but he had the strange feeling that he'd probably find out soon enough. 

This wasn't the first incident of this kind he'd experienced throughout his admittedly unusual life, and it surely wouldn't be the last, so he was in no rush to get up and start investigating. Instead, he kept still, slowly letting his eyes adjust to the bright surroundings and waiting for his body to go back to normal, his heart rate to slow down and his breathing to calm.

 

Eventually, the aching pressure in his head had faded, and he blinked a few times, hands slowly reaching up to cover his face before smoothing his wildly spiked hair. He had to get up at one point, so he rose to his feet only to find himself face to face with his reflection in the mirror. 

Pitch black eyes were staring back at him, obvious tiredness was evident in the almost violet shadows underneath them. His dark brown hair was a crass contrast to his pale, almost ghost-like skin. The nose ring was a late teenage rebellion he had experienced a few years back; but he had grown to like it and eventually decided to keep it despite his parents giving him dismissive looks every now and then.

He sighed, quietly, almost disapprovingly upon his own face, but soon enough his attention was drawn to his surroundings again.

 

His first idea seemed to have been right – a toilet, a sink and a shower with metal retainers to keep whoever was in it steady were evidence enough to convince him that he was in a hospital restroom; the kind that more important patients got when they managed to get assigned to a single room instead of having to share it with other patients. There were various shampoo bottles crowded in one corner of the shower, a dopp kit on a shelf beneath the sink, two towels folded neatly in the only cabinet. 

The duffel bag next to the shower seemed to be empty, so he figured whoever was staying in the room had been here for a longer amount of time and had unpacked their belongings and stored them in the dresser he'd probably find in the hospital room – if he dared to open the door and have a look outside, that was. 

 

The baby had started crying again. He could make out rushed steps on the other side of the door, probably a visitor, and he couldn't help the involuntary prayer that please, God, don't let them come into the bathroom, please – and fortunately, his prayer seemed to have been heard. The steps disappeared, the baby kept crying, and for a second he thought the heart rate monitor fastened its beeping noise. 

He was frozen in place for a few more moments; focused on picking up any noise from the other room – nothing, except for the constant whimpering from the baby. 

 

After being still for a few more minutes, he decided it should be alright to take the risk of opening the door. 

The knob moved easily, and the light from the bathroom poured out onto the blue vinyl floor of the dimmed room, a straight line of gold to the bed. There was a tiny person tucked into the sheets, unmoving, only a silhouette in the pale light of various screens gathered around the bed. 

The baby had gone silent, and he pushed the door open after turning off the light to not alert anyone possibly wandering the halls outside. 

He scanned the room quickly – a dresser to his left, some flowers propped up on the nightstand next to the bed, a small crib, a single chair in the middle of the room, a raincoat thrown over the backrest. So he'd been right and someone was visiting – said someone had left the room a few minutes ago, explaining the rushed steps. Hopefully they wouldn't decide to come back before he had a chance to leave the place; he still hadn't come up with an even close to realistic explanation as to why he was here and he was in no mood to be arrested again. 

 

He'd been staring at the crib for a few moments now; oddly drawn to it. His feet took over, carrying him to the small child's bed. 

The baby was silent, eyes huge and dark and clear and thoughtful in a very unsettling manner. Weren't newborns supposed to be sleepy and – confused?, he thought to himself with lack of a better word, shaking his head in discomfort. The gaze was almost piercing, and he was unable to avert his eyes. 

Tiny hands were grabbing into thin air, and before he could stop himself, he'd reached out, tip of his finger caressing the baby's cheek. 

„Shh“, he made, „shh. You're safe here.“ Whispered words, and although he knew better, he felt as if the baby somehow understood him. 

Its small fingers grabbed him, keeping his index finger in a tight lock, and still, it was watching him intensely. His heart was almost jumping out of his chest by now, and he shakily pulled his hand back when the person in the bed groaned. 

It was a woman, he concluded after a few seconds of held breath and scared staring – the mother, probably – and she seemed to be upset, moaning with suppressed agony, heart rate picking up, whimpering and shaking under the covers. 

The baby cried again, louder this time, and he stumbled back a few feet, eyes rolling back into his head and -

 

He inhaled sharply in the cold night's air, the familiar surroundings of Lane Park coming into focus. 

A police car was parked in the alley closest to him, a single officer with a flashlight pointed at him. 

„Hey, kid! You okay? What are you doing out here all alone? Get your punk ass home, tomorrow is a school day. Or do you want me to give you a ride and have a nice little chat with your parents, hm?“

„No, Sir. I'm – I'm sorry. I must've gotten lost, but I'll go home now. Thank you.“ 

The officer shook his head, obviously not buying his story about being lost – who would get lost in a tiny park in a tiny village in the middle of the night? - but decided to let him get off easy anyways. 

The sound of the car door falling shut echoed in the silence like a gunshot, and he could hear some birds flying off upon the intrusive noise. The police car was gone in no time, and he was on his own again. 

 

Clouds were blocking the sky, not allowing a single glimpse of the stars or the moon, and the streetlights had been turned off a while ago, but he knew the way to his house by heart. 

There wasn't a sound to be heard except his steps on the pavement, and he took his time, thinking about what he'd experienced just moments ago. 

Normally, he'd find himself at a time and place that was somehow connected to his life – an ancestor, a relative, someone important for his own timeline. This time, it seemed to be different; as if something had gone wrong and he'd somehow ended up in a place completely unconnected to his own life. 

He'd never been in a hospital like the one he'd found himself in, had no idea who the family was that he just involuntarily visited. He wasn't even sure if the hospital was in his city – the city close by, to be more precise, but he was almost certain that it wasn't. He'd visited people there before; and the floor had been different, the bathroom too, and the whole situation left him wondering what he was supposed to make of what he'd witnessed. 

But what did he see anways? There had been nothing happening, nothing of importance at least – or so it seemed. 

Maybe he was missing something? 

Maybe the person that left the room was the missing puzzle piece, maybe he would've known what was going on if he'd just had the chance to stay a bit longer and meet whoever was visiting the tiny woman in the bed and the baby. 

Probably the father, he mused to himself, suddendly a lot more awake than before upon a sudden idea – maybe he had visited himself? His own past? Was the baby in the crib himself? Maybe that explained the oddly knowing gaze of the kid. But wouldn't that be a paradox? Could he visit himself? 

His thoughts got stuck on that; pondering the possibilities and impossibilities of his own unusual life. It wasn't like he'd gotten a manual for how it worked, and he was still learning, had been learning since the first day he found himself in a completely overwhelming situation of being ripped out of his own present and thrown back into the past, the future – sometimes just weeks back or forth, sometimes years, centuries. 

His mind was still racing, circling, spreading out and up, down and sideways to shine a light on this uncomfortably strange situation as he was going to bed; tucking himself in and trying desperately to find rest. 

Eventually he gave up and took one of the anxiety pills his doctor had prescribed to him; supposed to calm his mind and give him a chance to breathe freely without the weight of never ending thoughts running through his head without ever taking a break. 

It took a while for them to have an effect; but finally he could feel himself drift off into a night filled with vivid dreams, pictures of a young man with piercing eyes and strange tattoos and a baby in a crib, staring straight into his soul.


	2. These Streets

„The year 2091 was the year of scientific breakthroughs. Medical technology made huge progress with the organic scanner, the very device prolonging the average life span by around fifty years, which is why today humans are able to live a healthy, happy life up to 170 years. I want you to read chapter seven of your books and fill out the worksheet I gave you with the information you gathered while reading.“ 

Tech class was probably the most boring class Josh had to attend, and he was sure that the teacher knew exactly how much he hated it. He was rarely one to hold back, and if he disliked something, people knew. His grades were remarkably low in this class, but it didn't matter to him. He did just fine in his other mandatory courses, so he'd decided a few months ago that there was no use in riling himself up over one class that he just couldn't help but despise. 

With an annoyed groan that earned him a dismissive look from his teacher, he shuffled through his book, pages filled with info graphics and endless texts about the oh-so-fascinating technical inventions of the last hundred years, finally reaching the chapter they'd been assigned to read. 

The whole text was about that damn scanner, and Josh felt like sleeping for a week from boredom just by looking at it. Sure, the scanner was actually pretty cool, and he was thankful for it, seeing that it was the mere reason he was alive today. Doctors had recognized and cured his congenital heart defect when he was just a baby, all thanks to the scanner picking up the fault in his body at once. But still, the process behind the whole thing, how it worked, how it was developed, who perfected the technology... Josh couldn't care less. 

His eyes were still fixed on the text, but his mind was wandering, not picking up any of the words on the page. Eversince he'd been an odd small child behind a far too gigantic drumkit, he had wanted to be a musician, a rockstar. He had always preferred playing an actual instrument instead of a holographic music station, much to his parents displeasure. His grandma had bought him the drumkit nonetheless, simply wanting to make him happy, and he was eternally grateful for that. 

In his opinion, music was meant to make people feel something, make them think about their lives and their world and society in a way that technically developed music could never manage to do. Admittedly, his dream of becoming an actual professional musician in this time and place was far fetched, knowing that one - he wasn't at all one to like the spotlight, and two, musicians were a dying profession. 

Right now, the only person that had ever heard any of his songs was his sister, and while he appreciated her feigned interest, he knew she was only pretending to dig his music for his own happiness. Again, he was thankful for that, but it was still disheartening to know that his one utter passion was generally frowned upon by whomever he trusted enough to share it with. 

"Mr. Dun, are you stillw ith us? I haven't seen you write anything down yet."

The teacher gave him a stern look, tapping an impatient finger on his own copy of the book sitting on his table.

"Yeah, sorry. Got distracted."

Josh buried his face in his hands, huffing a muttered profanity into his palms before finally starting to read. 

2091 – that was hundreds of years ago, and although he did have a very personal and particular interest in learning about the past he just couldn't bring himself to actually care. He'd much rather learn about actual people, about what they did back then. What was life like in a time of bare necessities? 

Sure, the world had had a few cool things back then – holographs were just invented, virtual realities were developed and became free to use, the first regular space travel companies launched for the public. To witness all that as a human living in that year.. That was the kind of stuff Josh wanted to learn about. Yet here he sat, eyes scanning over technical details and numbers and statistics and all he wanted to do was to fall asleep with his head on the book and hope for the important info to just somehow slip into his brain through his skin.

 

Time was a very curious thing for people, even more so for him specifically. It was relative, obviously, its pace depending on the situation he found himself in – this class, for example, seemed to be hours long, whereas cultural history seemed to be over in nothing more than a few minutes. 

His own experiences, admittedly, were vastly different from those of other people. Other people didn't exactly have the power to actually travel through time – literally, in his case. It had taken him a while to realize what was going on, why his vision suddenly blacked out and he woke up in a different place with an unbearable headache and shaky legs and sweaty hands, in strange places and unknown surroundings and with people he'd never seen before. 

It had happened first when he was just eleven years old – a scared kid thrown back to the year 2006, where cellphones were highly impractical and had barely any use except sending text messages and making calls, where driving a car was still done manually and life was dangerous and kind of barbaric. Wars, death, the whole world upside down and so different from the one he was growing up in. 

He'd cried the whole time, looking for his mum in a time where even his great grandparents were yet to be born. And as quickly as he'd been pushed through time, he was back; panting heavily, heart jumping out of his chest, on the floor of a bathroom at school. 

It happened without warning, and he gave up fighting it after a few years, instead focusing on trying to find out why exactly he'd been sent back to a particular time and place. Most of the time he visited relatives or people important to his own timeline, his grandparents when they were kids, his mum when she had just graduated college, his younger brother's grandkid a few centuries in the future - it was all a huge mess, but he had learned to deal with it.

He found out the hard way that opening up about his own identity while visiting wasn't something he should do when he told said grandkid who he was, catapulting him back to his own time with a violent pull that left him sick for weeks, unable to eat or focus or think straight, bound to the bed with a sickness no doctor could explain. He'd never made that mistake again; mostly keeping to himself and not speaking much while he was visiting another time. 

He had no strong opinion about what he was doing. He kept his power a secret, living a life as normal as possible under the circumstances, silently enduring the knowledge and secrets he discovered. 

People didn't really pay attention to him in the first place, and he was lucky that way – although no time passed in his own present while he was away, he still assumed it had to look weird when he came back, suddenly out of breath, roughed up and confused. But Josh was a quiet kid who liked to be on his own, his only friend living across the country, almost a day's worth of travelling with the hyperspeed train. 

The bell rang, and Josh realized he couldn't remember a single word he'd read. His worksheet was still empty, and when he turned it in with just his name written on it, his teacher just sighed and wrote down something. He'd probably come home to a lecture when the teacher decided to call his parents again, but at the moment, all Josh wanted to do was get out of this hell people actually had the audacity to call a learning institution.

Josh was a hundred percent sure he'd screw up the exam big time next week. For a brief second, he thought about asking his older sister for help, only to overrule the idea again in the blink of an eye. He loved his sister Ashley, but she was a horrible tutor. He'd just fail the test and go on with his life the way he always did. He'd gotten pretty good with enduring his mum's scoldings and not letting them get to him – he was 17, after all, it wasn't like he was a child anymore that had to obey whatever his parents told him. 

He shoved his text book and his stack of notes into his messenger bag, throwing it lazily over one shoulder before leaving the room without a goodbye. 

His way home was a hassle, overcrowded trains and people bumping into him while rushing to wherever they needed to be – people nowadays never seemed to have time, everyone was always in a rush to get somewhere, be somewhere, be someone, do whatever oh-so-important business they had to do. 

Headphones on, he held onto the metal retainers close to the train doors, swaying with the movements of the wagon and in rhythm with the beat of the song blasting on his phone, eyes closed. There was no sound intruding from the crowded surroundings, and he got lost in the guitars and the piano melodies taking his mind to places he'd never been before, only in his dreams. 

Sometimes he wished the train ride was longer so that he could enjoy his little escape some more, but everything was automatic and synched and trains were never late anymore. The name of the station he needed blinked in screaming red LED lights, and he pushed through the people blocking the door. 

His bike was still where he left it, hidden behind some bushes growing close to the train station. It took him about twenty minutes to go home by bike; across Lane Park and through half of the village he lived in. 

The wind messed up his hair while he rode through the park, and some kids were playing in the sunlight, throwing some hoops on the last outside basketball court in town. He'd used to play there too, but eventually lost interest – he'd never been bad at it, he just found more comfort and purpose in his music and eventually spend most of his time writing and playing and coming up with melodies that resonated in his mind more than a useless game of throw ball. 

So naturally, after tucking his bike away in the garage next to his Dad's Tesla, he went straight to his room in the basement, throwing his bag into a corner and changing into more comfortable clothes. His drum kit was his sanctuary, and he pushed his headphones to cover his ears again, letting his most recent piano melody play along as he tried to come up with a fitting beat, humming nonsense words with closed eyes as he let the music wash over him. 

He played for an hour, glistening drops of sweat forming on his forehead, sticking his hair to his skin, and finally, he was at home.


End file.
